This book is the _classic_ in C, being written by the people that created C (was it only Ritchie or both Ritchie and Kernighan?). It's ideal for someone w/ some programming experience that's trying to learn C because the book is very compact and doesn't describe simple programming terms like functions, statements, variables, constants, etc. in great detail. Although the book is very concise, it goes through almost every major feature in C, including unions and bit fields and malloc and calloc. However, this book doesn't go into detail into telling you how to make "big" programs, i.e. your own header files and a project with several source files. Try books like "A Book on C" (and I do recommend this book--it's great) for this type of stuff.Basically, this is a great book, and I really respect Ritchie and Kernighan for their hard work into the book.

This is the worst Dummies book I have read. The negative reviews above mirror my impression exactly: Illogical presentation, dry text with idiotic puns as the only "humor", no rhyme or reason to the structure of the book. Six million monkeys typing away on iMacs have a better chance of authoring a web page than a novice armed with this book.Useful only as a reference, and there are cheaper, more concise references available.This book made me angry that I blew hard-earned money on it. Not on the same level as the other Dummies books by a long shot.

I've been working with Photoshop for a few years now, but I was self-taught. When I got CS, I decided to work through a course book to catch up on anything I was missing.I did not get as much out of this book as I hoped. It really is aimed at the newbie who wants to create & edit projects ASAP, with little explanation surronding the tools they're using. For example, you're directed to go to a tool in the Filter menu, check off these two boxes and enter 70% here, then click ok. There's little explanation for why you'd want to check those boxes, or why you'd enter 70 and not 38.I think this is a good beginner's course, especially for someone who will take the time to go beyond what's presented in the book, and play with the tools to figure out what they do.